We sat down for an exclusive interview with acclaimed award-winning live poet Luke Wright. Touring his most personal show yet with Later Life Letter, using spoken word, storytelling and stand-up, Wright delves into his own adoption and what it means to belong.
Later Life Letter kick off its UK Tour at London’s Southbank Centre on 16th January 2026.
Full tour date and tickets here
This is described as your most personal show to date. What made you decide you were finally ready to explore your adoption story publicly through Later Life Letter?
It all started about four and a half years ago when I met my wife, Katy, who’s a social worker. At the time she was writing these things called later life letters — letters written for adopted children with information about the biological families they came from, usually passed on when the child is old enough to understand.
In my case, I got mine at 18 and I’d always treasured it, but I hadn’t thought about it for years. Then one night, early in our relationship, I found Katy writing later life letters — it was actually her last day on the job, and she knew that if she didn’t finish them, those children wouldn’t have this really important document. Watching the care and dedication she put into those letters made me go back to my own and read it again.
That sent me down the path of thinking more about my biological family. I started writing about it, and the more I wrote, the more I wanted to understand. The poems came hand in hand with my own exploration of my feelings around adoption.
Later Life Letter deals with discovering your birth mother on Facebook and navigating the complicated loyalties between biological and adoptive families. What was the hardest part of that experience to translate into poetry and performance?
The hardest part is working out what I actually feel about it all. I can give you incidents that happened — moments growing up, the moment of finding my birth mother on Facebook and having this little glimpse into her life even though I haven’t met her. You feel those things deeply at the time, but when you write about them you just have to put them down plainly and simply, and let the weight of the situation do the heavy lifting.
The harder poems were the ones asking: “Where am I now? What do I actually feel about all this?” That’s hard to answer, but poetry helps — you shouldn’t know where a poem’s going when you start. Writing poetry is a way of discovering how you feel.
You mention that you only recently began to examine what adoption really means to you. How did writing and performing this show reshape your understanding of belonging and identity?
I can’t separate my personal journey from the writing of the poems. The project is 50 poems — half of which feature in the show — and I didn’t consciously sit down to write a show. I sat down to write poems, and they became a book and a show.
Writing about these experiences as they happened made the whole process easier for me. Even when the material is emotionally heavy, turning it into a poem is an act of taking control. I’m not changing any facts, but it takes the sting out of them. They stop being so live and become something I can share with an audience. It lightens the load.
As far as belonging goes, I’ve always felt I belonged with the family that adopted me. They are my family. But it’s important to acknowledge that it’s not nothing — that you came from somewhere else, no matter how smooth or loving the adoption is. It’s about acknowledging that truth.
The piece blends poetry, memoir and stand-up. How did you find the balance between humour and vulnerability when telling a story that is so personal and emotionally charged?
It could easily be really heavy, and I don’t want that. A lot depends on my abilities as a performer. The strange thing is that the less “performance-y” the material is — the small, fragile poems — the more they require of me to make them sing.
There’s also pacing to think about. A series of one-minute poems with applause after each one would be awful. So I’ve grouped poems together to create a sense of continuity. Some poems have been turned into little bits of linking material. I’ve also worked hard to write some genuine gags for the show — not to make it laugh-a-minute (that wouldn’t be appropriate), but because language play and humour help create warmth and connection.
The most important thing is warmth. Humour is one way to achieve that, but so is the tone, the language, and refusing to be remote from the audience. Warmth and directness are essential.
Your work often explores modern masculinity, privilege and politics. Where does Later Life Letter sit within your wider body of writing, and how does it challenge or expand the themes you’ve tackled before?
It’s very much at the personal end of what I write — the most confessional. You could say it’s the least political, but adoption is full of politics, and I address that. There’s a lot of talk about class in the show because class is so present in adoption.
I came from a working-class family, but I was brought up by middle-class adoptive parents. That’s a very familiar adoption story, and I wanted to explain how that makes me examine privilege, and how it informs my ideas of class. That’s touched on a fair amount in the show.
A later life letter is usually written to help adopted children understand their story when they are older. In creating this show, did you feel like you were writing a version of that letter to your younger self, and what do you think he most needed to hear?
I’ve definitely been through a process of thinking about my younger self. In the small amount of therapy I’ve done around this, one of the exercises was literally writing a letter to my younger self — something I did before or around the same time as writing these poems.
So that idea of communing with my younger self is definitely a backbone to the project, even if it’s not directly written. My younger self was fairly unfazed about adoption, although of course there were issues that may have been connected to it. But mainly, I put a lot of pressure on myself growing up.
The process was about forgiving myself, giving myself space, and telling myself I’m enough. Those aren’t issues unique to adopted people — they’re universal. And I think a lot of the show’s themes are universal too. Everyone has a family. Everyone has insecurities and anxieties. So even though adoption is a big part of the story, much of the show is simply about what it is to be a child, a parent, a person.